Lit Crit
I've seen
this list of "the greatest novels of all time" linked to from several places lately, most recently from
A Voyage to Arcturus. I usually find these kinds of lists pointless, at best, but for some reason this one struck me as kind of interesting, and it was good to see that quite a few of the works listed were books that I'd not only read, but actually
liked. I thought I'd go down the list and offer some thoughts and opinions on the ones I'm actually familiar with... I've copied the entire list here, but if I haven't made any comments on something, you can assume that it's because I haven't read it.
OK, let's see...
1.
Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes
This one is on my to-read pile, and has been for quite some time. I keep thinking that I really ought to get around to it soon, but, then, there are a couple of hundred other books about which I keep thinking the exact same thing.
2.
Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan
3.
Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe
I've read this one. The most interesting thing about it, actually, isn't the survival on a desert island adventure stuff, but the social attitudes that are implicit in it, some of which are deeply weird and more than a little disturbing to modern sensibilities. It isn't about one guy surviving heroically on a desert island; it's actually about one guy setting himself up as lord and master of a not-quite-deserted island with everybody else subservient to him, because that's the natural way these things are done.
4.
Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift
Brilliant satire, and still as fresh and enjoyable (and disturbingly relevant) now as the day it was written.
5.
Tom Jones Henry Fielding
6.
Clarissa Samuel Richardson
7.
Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne
8.
Dangerous Liaisons Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
I've seen one of the many movie versions of this and liked it quite a lot, but have never read the book.
9.
Emma Jane Austen
Oh, man. I was forced to read this book in high school, and it put me off Austen for life. I
loathed it. (And my attitude wasn't much helped by the fact that it was the English teacher's favorite book, either.) Visiting the world Emma lived in was, for me, like being trapped in my own personal hell, a place where the only subjects of conversation ever allowed are on dress designs and tactics for snagging a man.
*Shudder*
10.
Frankenstein Mary Shelley
A classic. And a book which people who haven't actually
read it often have entirely mistaken ideas about. The theme is generally assumed to be that there are Things Which Man Was Not Meant to Know, and that it's Wrong to Play God, and that the creations of our hubris will inevitably turn on us. It's not. It's about what happens when we don't take the
responsibility for what we create. Which I think is a
much more valid and important thing to focus on.
11.
Nightmare Abbey Thomas Love Peacock
12.
The Black Sheep Honore De Balzac
13.
The Charterhouse of Parma Stendhal
14.
The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas
Haven't read this one, but I ought to pick it up sometime. I read
The Three Musketeers earlier this year and really enjoyed it.
15.
Sybil Benjamin Disraeli
16.
David Copperfield Charles Dickens
I started reading this in a Reader's Digest condensed version when I was 10. (Not that I'd touch a Reader's Digest condensed book with a ten-foot pole now, but, hey, I was ten.) I remember enjoying it right up to the point where the main character grew up, and then rapidly losing interest. I probably ought to try giving it another go sometime, though. I actually do rather like Dickens.
17.
Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
18.
Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
Had exactly the same experience with this as with
David Copperfield, actually, except that I have zero desire to go back and try this one again, mainly because I've got the Brontes mentally cataloged as being in the same awful category as Austen.
19.
Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray
20.
The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne
Was forced to read this in high school and
hated it. Mainly I remember page after page after page of boring descriptions of leaves.
21.
Moby-Dick Herman Melville
Now, this is one that I'm quite sure I
would have hated if they'd made me read it in school, but which I very much enjoyed reading on my own. Yeah, the long descriptions of whaling techniques get a little old after a while, but they're a hell of a lot more interesting than Jane Austen's discussions about dressmaking or whatever. And there really is a great story in there, as well as some extremely vivid and memorable characters.
22.
Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert
23.
The Woman in White Wilkie Collins
24.
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll
Surreal and clever and loads of fun. I've read this multiple times since my first encounter with it as a kid.
25.
Little Women Louisa M. Alcott
I remember reading this as a child, but almost nothing about it. Doesn't seem like the sort of book that would appeal to me these days.
26.
The Way We Live Now Anthony Trollope
27.
Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
28.
Daniel Deronda George Eliot
29.
The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky
30.
The Portrait of a Lady Henry James
31.
Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
I
love Twain. He's tremendously funny, a great storyteller, and has a fine grasp of character and dialog. And of the books of his that I've read,
Huckleberry Finn is easily the best. I enjoyed the heck out of this one
despite being made to read it in English class.
32.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson
Another one of those works, like
Frankenstein, that everybody is familiar with and thinks they know all about, but which comparatively few people have actually read. Which is a pity, because it's very good. Though I still think that Stevenson's best story, at least of those I've read, is "The Bottle Imp."
33.
Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome
I've never been entirely sure whether this was actually a novel, or a (probably considerably exaggerated) work of non-fiction. Either way, it's a lot of fun. I made a point of picking this one up after reading Connie Willis'
To Say Nothing of the Dog, which was directly inspired by it, and was very glad I did.
34.
The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde
Will it surprise anybody if I say that I decided to read this one mainly because there was an episode of
Blake's 7 which was directly inspired by it? Science fiction connections aside, it's a really interesting book, featuring one of the most memorably twisted characters I've ever encountered (and, no, it's not Dorian), as well as a lot of philosophical/thematic stuff that, whether you agree with it or not, is guaranteed to get you thinking in disturbing new ways. It
is a little frustrating to read, though, because there's clearly all kinds of stuff Wilde wanted to put in it that he couldn't talk about directly given the mores of the day, so there were many times when I found myself torn between wondering whether I was reading too much in, or whether I wasn't reading in enough.
35.
The Diary of a Nobody George Grossmith
36.
Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy
37.
The Riddle of the Sands Erskine Childers
38.
The Call of the Wild Jack London
I
may have read, or at least started reading this when I was very young, but if so, I don't remember it.
39.
Nostromo Joseph Conrad
40.
The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame
Did read this one as a kid. Remember liking it, but not a whole lot else about it.
41.
In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust
42.
The Rainbow D. H. Lawrence
43.
The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford
44.
The Thirty-Nine Steps John Buchan
45.
Ulysses James Joyce
Ugh. I was forced to read
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in school, and developed almost as big a loathing for Joyce as I have for Austen. I am convinced, whether rationally or otherwise, that the only reason anybody ever reads
Ulysses is for sheer snob value. No thanks.
46.
Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf
47.
A Passage to India E. M. Forster
48.
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
Another one I had to read in English class. As I recall, pretty much everybody
but me liked it. I think a large part of my problem with it was exactly the same sort of problem I had with
Emma, or with Douglas Coupland's
Generation X, or with William Gibson's
Neuromancer, to tie in examples from a variety of genres. I can't stand shallow people whose biggest desire in life is to impress other with how rich or cool or hip they are, and I hate hanging around with them, even when they're fictional.
49.
The Trial Franz Kafka
50.
Men Without Women Ernest Hemingway
51.
Journey to the End of the Night Louis-Ferdinand Celine
52.
As I Lay Dying William Faulkner
53.
Brave New World Aldous Huxley
An SF classic, and much more readable than your average depressing dystopian novel. What I find interesting about it is that Huxley's imagined world is simultaneously horrible and, well, actually kind of appealing.
54.
Scoop Evelyn Waugh
55.
USA John Dos Passos
56.
The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler
Hmm, I really ought to read some Chandler some time. I love hard-boiled detective stories when they're blended in with some other genre, but I've actually read very few of the real and original thing.
57.
The Pursuit Of Love Nancy Mitford
58.
The Plague Albert Camus
59.
Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
Yeah, it's an Important and Influential book, there's no doubt about it, but it was actually kind of tedious to read. And depressing, of course, but, then, it's supposed to be.
60.
Malone Dies Samuel Beckett
61.
Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
I think the vast majority of Americans were forced to read this in high school, but somehow I never was. Which is just fine by me. What little I know about it leads me to conclude that I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it. Teenage angst, unlike most other forms of angst, holds very little appeal for me.
62.
Wise Blood Flannery O'Connor
63.
Charlotte's Web E. B. White
A childhood favorite of mine. I used to watch the movie every time it came on TV (which was about once a year). My first encounter with the book was when our teacher read it out loud to us in the third grade. She read us
Stuart Little and
The Trumpet of the Swan, too. Some fond memories there.
64.
The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien
You can quibble about Tolkien's writing style, and I won't be too inclined to argue, but I nevertheless regard
Lord of the Rings as being possibly
the great story of our time.
65.
Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis
66.
Lord of the Flies William Golding
Another one that everybody but me seems to have read in school. One of these days, I really ought to get around to reading it, if only because I keep encountering so many references to it.
67.
The Quiet American Graham Greene
68.
On the Road Jack Kerouac
I took an "America in the 60's" literature class in college, in which we read Kesey and all kinds of other stuff in which there was much discussion of Kerouac... But we didn't actually read Kerouac himself. Maybe I should correct that oversight some day, but I'm not feeling in any hurry about it.
69.
Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
70.
The Tin Drum Gunter Grass
71.
Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe
72.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark
73.
To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee
74.
Catch-22 Joseph Heller
I think this book actually helped me develop my current sense of appreciation for black comedy. it's simultaneously depressing as hell and very, very, funny, which is a great combination if you can carry it off.
75.
Herzog Saul Bellow
76.
One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
77.
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont Elizabeth Taylor
78.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy John Le Carre
79.
Song of Solomon Toni Morrison
80.
The Bottle Factory Outing Beryl Bainbridge
81.
The Executioner's Song Norman Mailer
82.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller Italo Calvino
A book that totally shouldn't work -- what with the second person, and the fact that it never actually finishes any of the stories it starts -- but nevertheless somehow
does. I gather that it was mainly written as a deliberate response to various lit-snob theories about "the nature of the novel" and what supposedly makes a good novel, but you don't have to be a literary academic to appreciate the points it has to make about the nature of stories and the experience of reading. And Calvino has a marvelous way with words.
83.
A Bend in the River V. S. Naipaul
84.
Waiting for the Barbarians J.M. Coetzee
85.
Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson
86.
Lanark Alasdair Gray
87.
The New York Trilogy Paul Auster
88.
The BFG Roald Dahl
I
think I read this one, way back in the depths of my childhood. Don't remember much of anything about it, specifically, but I
adored Dahl as a child, and still do as an adult.
89.
The Periodic Table Primo Levi
90.
Money Martin Amis
91.
An Artist of the Floating World Kazuo Ishiguro
92.
Oscar And Lucinda Peter Carey
93.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera
94.
Haroun and the Sea of Stories Salman Rushdie
Ought to check this one out sometime. I've heard it's extremely good, but I can't help but wonder how much of the hype has more to do with the author than the story.
95.
La Confidential James Ellroy
96.
Wise Children Angela Carter
97.
Atonement Ian McEwan
98.
Northern Lights Philip Pullman
This was released under the title
The Golden Compass in the US, the first volume of the "His Dark Materials" trilogy. I enjoyed reading these books, but I did have some serious philosophical and narrative quibbles with the series as a whole. The first book, though, was in my view probably the best.
99.
American Pastoral Philip Roth
100.
Austerlitz W. G. Sebald
Hmm, that's about 20 out of 100 read. Seems like kind of a poor showing, but then, I never claimed to be a connoisseur of Great Literature, anyway...
